How to read and manipulate an avi file in C?

[Chaithan]

I've gone through the threads. On other person had asked the same question but the answer to that was to use DirectShow. My project requires manipulation of an avi file using only C. I finished simulation of my project in Matlab quite easily but having trouble with C. Any guidance in this regard will be very helpful.

[weaknessforcats]

An AVI file is just a data file. You read it just like any other file in C. Probably, tis is a binary file and not a text file.

However, in order to make sense of the data in the file you need to know the file layout so you know what it is that you are reading.

I would research AVI file layouts and get familiar with what the data is for and how it is written in the file.

[Savage]

Manipulating AVI files on your own is completly unrecomendable considering how many codecs are there(you would need to write seperate code to handle most common types of codecs atleast..), so its much better if you can find some library that already does it for you. DirectShow is quite good, but its written as a set of C++ classes. You could write some wrapper code to alow you to use it with C code only, or you could try to find some crossplatform C library.. for example libavcodec seems good to me(here is how to use it..).

Good luck :)
Savage

[Chaithan]

Thank you for your replies. I tried lots of things, I started with fopen and fread but the avi format was just too complex to understand and manipulate via the bit streams.
I then included vfw.h and the avi library and tried using functions like AVIFileInit, AVIFileOpen etc but i'm not able to run them. I wrote a simple function jus to open and read a video file. It doesnt show any errors after compilation but fails to execute. It says " project1.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.".

I just gave a glance at the link provided by Savage and it looks helpful. So i'm gonna go through it and try it now. Hope i'm able to sort it out soon for my own sake. I shall update what happens. Thanks people..appreciated